Statism to the Left, Statism to the Right

Part Two

by
Thomas A. Droleskey

With ObamaCare in shambles, it would stand to reason on a purely natural level that the statists who compose the Congressional leadership of the feckless group of naturalists in the organized crime family of the false opposite of the naturalist "right" would be eager to try to fund ways to prevent any aspect of ObamaCare's monstrous, draconian program from being implemented, starting with defunding as much of it as possible.

There are at least sixty members of the United States House of Representatives, led by fifty-four year-old freshman United States Representative Mark Meadows (R-North Carolina), to defund ObamaCare by refusing to vote for any bill to find the Federal government unless it funding for ObamaCare is excised.

"In light of the Administration’s recent delay of the employer mandate
and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) scandal, it is imperative, now
more than ever, that Congress do everything in its power to halt the
implementation of the healthcare law,” Meadows writes. “It is entirely
unacceptable that the IRS, a government agency that actively
discriminates against Americans, is in charge of implementing a law that
Americans do not want.” (Defund Obamacare.)

A similar effort in the United States Senate is being led by United States Senators Michael Lee (R-Utah) and Robert Edward "Ted" Cruz (R-Texas). Senator Lee sent the following letter to the smarmy little slimeball and professional demagogue who serves as the Majority Leader of the United States Senate, United States Senator Harry Reid (D-Nevada), on July 25, 2013, while Jorge Mario Bergoglio/Francis (don't worry, there will be another article about him after this particular commentary is completed and posted) was cavorting around in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, during the doctrinal, liturgical, moral, pastoral and aesthetic abomination that was World Youth Day 2013:

We view the Obama Administration’s recent decision to delay ObamaCare's employer mandate and eligibility verification for the individual exchanges as further proof the law is a failure that will inevitably hurt businesses, American families, and the economy.

In light of this admission, we believe the only way to avert disaster is to fully repeal ObamaCare and start over with a more sensible, practical approach to reforming our healthcare system.

However, if Democrats will not agree with Republicans that ObamaCare must be repealed, perhaps they can at least agree with the president that the law cannot be implemented as written. If the administration will not enforce the law as written, then the American people should not be forced to fund it.

This is a matter not only of fiscal prudence, but of fundamental fairness as well. The president cannot seriously expect to waive ObamaCare’s onerous mandates on large businesses, while simultaneously forcing individuals and families to pay to implement an individual mandate the public has opposed since before the law was even passed.

For these reasons, we will not support any continuing resolution or appropriations legislation that funds further implementation or enforcement of ObamaCare.

Given the fact that results from various recent public opinion polls demonstrate overwhelmingly a desire on the part of the American public for ObamaCare to be repealed in its entirety, one would think that the hapless leadership of the Republican Party in the United States Senate and in the United States House of Representatives would be fully supportive of the effort to defund ObamaCare in the upcoming "continuing resolution" to fund the Federal government what the ancients would have called a "budget," a legal requirement that has not been realized in its full legal sense since 1997, although an omnibus spending bill that many considered to have been an ersatz budget was passed in 2009.

Au contraire.

The statists to the false opposite of the naturalist "right" are fearful that a fight to defund ObamaCare would provoke another "government shutdown" of the type that then President William Jefferson Blythe Clinton used in 1995 to demagogue then House Speaker Newtown Leroy Gingrich (R-Georgia) and the then Senate Majority Leader, the ever-inarticulate and mercurial thirty-third degree Freemason named Robert Joseph Dole, Jr. (R-Kansas, by way, of course, of his permanent resident status at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, District of Columbia, which is where he has lived for years now).

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) warned the
GOP that the American people don’t want to see another debt ceiling
fight and government shutdown “shenanigans.” Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) also
refused to support the plan.

In the House, Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) likened the effort to a “temper tantrum.”

“Seems to me there’s appropriate ways
to deal with the law, but shutting down the government to get your way
over an unrelated piece of legislation is the political equivalent of
throwing a temper tantrum,” Cole told Fox News Wednesday.

Instead, for Cole, it’s about the Republicans’ chances in the 2014 and 2016 elections.

“It’s just not helpful. And it is the
sort of thing that creates a backlash and could cost the Republicans the
majority in the House, which is after all the last line of defense
against the president. And it could materially undercut the ability of
the Republicans in the Senate to have the majority in 2014, which they
have a decent chance to do,” he added. “And it could materially undercut
the ability of the Republicans in the Senate to have the majority in
2014, which they have a decent chance to do.” (A Senate Divided: GOP Senator Says Mike Lee's Plan to Defund ObamaCare is the Dumbest Idea I've Ever Heard.)

As
the fall’s fiscal drama nears, a group of conservative lawmakers
is urging Republican leaders to use Obamacare as a bargaining
chip. Behind the scenes, they’re warning Speaker John Boehner and Senate
minority leader Mitch McConnell that unless the president’s signature
law is defunded, they won’t support a “continuing resolution” to fund
the federal government.

The debate has caused tension in the ranks since many Republicans are uncomfortable with talk of a shutdown. Speaking with National Review Online on Friday, House majority leader Eric Cantor clarified the House’s strategy. “No one is advocating a government shutdown,” he said.

He also threw a little cold water on the “defund or shutdown” rallying cry. “In order
to avoid a government shutdown, we need 60 votes in the Senate and 218
votes in the House to pass a continuing resolution,” he explained. “To
get 60 votes in the Senate, you need at least 14 Democrats
to join Republicans and pass a CR that defunds Obamacare. Right now, I
am not aware of a single Democrat in the Senate who would join us. If
and when defunding has 60 votes in the Senate, we will absolutely
deliver more than 218 votes in the House.”

“Repealing Obamacare remains the goal,” Cantor said, ”as is doing everything we can to protect people from its harmful effects here and now, like
delaying the mandate for people, not just big business.” But for the
moment, connecting government funding to that effort isn’t likely part
of his plan. (Eric Cantor Says "Nyet" to Defunding ObamaCare.)

These hapless fools in the organized crime family of the naturalist "right" are always so worried about the "next election."

Yes, those adhering to the brand of naturalism called "conservatism" were told by the likes of House Speaker John Boehner (R-West Chester, Ohio) and House Majority Leader (R-Virginia, Freemason) in 2011 and 2012 that they just had to "wait" until after the 2012 elections for the Republicans to win back the White House and gain a majority of seats in the United States Senate. They just had to "live" with ObamaCare and the lawless law-making by Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro until that time as the Congressional arithmetic dictated against any efforts that could "offend" the tender, touchy-feely sensibilities of so-called "moderate" or "swing" voters. This is why, as noted three days ago in part one of this two-part series, many professional Republicans simply want those nasty "social issues" to disappear even at the state level. Can't have any of that "nonsense" get in the way of "victory," right?

What constitutes "victory" for the Republican careerists is the winning of elected offices as ends in of themselves, which means that their "god" is carefully-targeted focus-group market research polling on what the "people" in those swing states and districts "feel" is important.

This is why the Republicans, who are being labeled as racist by Obama/Soetoro's apologists, including the aforementioned Senate Majority Slimeball and Weasel, Harry Reid, choose to ignore the Communist-style thuggery by which Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro, unfettered by any concern about polling results and believe firmly in the righteousness of his own ideology and the invincible infallibility of his person, is ignoring not only the laws of God but those of men. The Constitution of the United States of America and the laws passed by the United States Congress become defenseless when men such as Obama, who govern in a purely authoritarian manner, are enabled by cowardly, careerists in the organized crime family of the naturalist "right" in order to play it "safe" for the next election.

Naturalist columnist George Will explained the truly lawless nature of Barack Obama/Barry Soetoro's presidency in a column published yesterday, August 15, 2013, the Feast of the Assumption of the Most Blessed Virgin Mary:

President Obama’s increasingly grandiose claims for presidential
power are inversely proportional to his shriveling presidency.
Desperation fuels arrogance as, barely 200 days into the 1,462 days of
his second term, his pantry of excuses for failure is bare, his domestic agenda is nonexistent and his foreign policy of empty rhetorical deadlines and red lines is floundering. And at last week’s news conference he offered inconvenience as a justification for illegality.

Explaining his decision to unilaterally rewrite the Affordable Care Act (ACA), he said: “I didn’t simply choose to” ignore the statutory
requirement for beginning in 2014 the employer mandate to provide
employees with health care. No, “this was in consultation with
businesses.”

President Obama’s increasingly grandiose claims for presidential power are inversely proportional to his shriveling presidency. Desperation fuels arrogance as, barely 200 days into the 1,462 days of his second term, his pantry of excuses for failure is bare, his domestic agenda is nonexistent and his foreign policy of empty rhetorical deadlines and red lines is floundering. And at last week’s news conference he offered inconvenience as a justification for illegality.

Explaining his decision to unilaterally rewrite the Affordable Care Act (ACA), he said: “I didn’t simply choose to” ignore the statutory requirement for beginning in 2014 the employer mandate to provide employees with health care. No, “this was in consultation with businesses.”

In a 1977 interview with Richard Nixon, David Frost asked: “Would you say that there are certain situations . . . where the president can decide that it’s in the best interests of the nation . . . and do something illegal?”

Nixon: “Well, when the president does it, that means it is not illegal.”

Frost: “By definition.”

Nixon: “Exactly, exactly.”

Nixon’s claim, although constitutionally grotesque, was less so than the claim implicit in Obama’s actions regarding the ACA. Nixon’s claim was confined to matters of national security or (he said to Frost) “a threat to internal peace and order of significant magnitude.” Obama’s audacity is more spacious; it encompasses a right to disregard any portion of any law pertaining to any subject at any time when the political “environment” is difficult.

Obama should be embarrassed that, by ignoring the legal requirement concerning the employer mandate, he has validated critics who say the ACA cannot be implemented as written. What does not embarrass him is his complicity in effectively rewriting the ACA for the financial advantage of self-dealing members of Congress and their staffs.

The ACA says members of Congress (annual salaries: $174,000) and their staffs (thousands making more than $100,000) must participate in the law’s insurance exchanges. It does not say that when this change goes into effect, the current federal subsidy for this affluent cohort — up to 75 percent of the premium’s cost, perhaps $10,000 for families — should be unchanged.

When Congress awakened to what it enacted, it panicked: This could cause a flight of talent, making Congress less wonderful. So Obama directed the Office of Personnel Management, which has no power to do this, to authorize for the political class special subsidies unavailable for less privileged and less affluent citizens.

The difference between Obama's unconstitutional exercises of nonexistent raw executive power and those of Richard Milhous Nixon's forty years ago is that the thirty-seventh President of the United States of America had political opponents who were ruthless as he was, men and women, including a young attorney named Hillary Rodham who was working as legislative aide to House Judiciary Committee Peter Rodino (D-New Jersey), a pro-abortion Democrat who was buried with full honors in the counterfeit church of conciliarism after having taught at Seton Hall University as a law professor after his retirement from the United States House of Representatives at the end of the One Hundredth Congress on January 3, 1989, who were determined to throw the book at the man they loathed both personally and politically. This was ironic given the fact that Richard Nixon was a firm supporter of "population control" (see and helped to institutionalize the statist "Great Society" programs of his grandiose statist predecessor, Lyndon Baines Johnson.

Obama, on the other hand, is opposed by mealy-mouthed little weasels who can't even read the signs of the time in merely natural, no less supernatural, terms. Careerist Republicans are oblivious to the fact that the electoral deck has been stacked against them in a presidential election cycle because of changes in demography that have made some populous states with mother lodes of electoral votes completely noncompetitive while turning formerly "red" states into "blue" or "purple" states. Leaving aside the Nixon and Ronald Reagan landslides of 1972 and 1984, respectively, there has only been one presidential election since 1960 in which a Republican received more than fifty-one percent of the popular vote.

Sure, then former Vice President Richard Nixon defeated then incumbent Vice President Hubert Horatio Humphrey in 1968. However, Nixon's winning margin over Humphrey the popular vote total (which, of course, is not how presidents are elected but serve nevertheless as a gauge of popular support at the polls in a given year) was only one percent of the popular vote total in a three-way race against former (and future) Governor of the State of Alabama George Corley Wallace. Nixon won 43.4% of the popular vote to Humphrey's 42.4% .

Even then former Governor Ronald Wilson Reagan did not crack the fifty-one percent mark in 1980 over then President James Earl Carter, Jr. Yes, Reagan won 50.5%, an actual majority, to Carter's 41%, a handy victory to be sure. However, then United States Representative John B. Anderson (R-Illinois), a Republican who lost the presidential nomination to Reagan attracted around seven percent of the popular vote on an third party line, meaning that the combined anti-Reagan vote was forty-eight percent. Reagan won a stunning victory in the electoral college and certainly had a mandate in the 1980 election. However, the election did not indicate a national groundswell of support for the Republican Party even though naturalists of the "right" won a majority of seats in the United States Senate for the first time since 1952, promptly turning them into Washington power-brokers who did not want to lose the majority, which, of course, they lost in 1986 midterm elections.

The only Republican to win more than fifty-one percent of the popular vote since then President Dwight David Eisenhower's re-election in 1956 was incumbent Vice President George Herbert Walker Bush in 1988, who won 53.1% to then Governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Michael S "M-1" Dukakis's 45.5% of the popular vote total, although this was almost exclusively a referendum on incumbent President Reagan's personal popularity and the expectation that Bush.

Bush, however, used his presidency to make possible the election of the philandering, adulterous Governor of the State of Arkansas, William Jefferson Blythe Clinton. Bush believed in nothing apart from population control and the "New World Order," about which he boasted before a special joint session of the Congress of the United States of America following the end of the unjust, immoral and needless "Persian Gulf War" on March 6, 1991, which was a reiteration of a speech he had given to Congress on September 11, 1990, a month after the Iraqi invasion and occupation of Kuwait, which took place eight days (that's right, eight days) after the American Ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, had signaled to Saddam Hussein that Kuwait was not of significant enough interest for the
United States of America to do anything other than express a verbal
condemnation in its behalf should he, Hussein, decide to reclaim Iraqi
land that was taken away from it following the end of World War I (see Longer Than World War II):

Now, we can see a new world coming into view. A world in which there is
the very real prospect of a new world order. In the words of Winston
Churchill, a world order in which "the principles of justice and fair
play protect the weak against the strong. . . ." A world where the
United Nations, freed from cold war stalemate, is poised to fulfill the
historic vision of its founders. A world in which freedom and respect
for human rights find a home among all nations. The Gulf war put this
new world to its first test. And my fellow Americans, we passed that
test. (Address on the End of the Gulf War, February 27, 1991.)

We stand today at a unique and extraordinary moment. The crisis in the
Persian Gulf, as grave as it is, also offers a rare opportunity to move
toward an historic period of cooperation. Out of these troubled times, our fifth objective—a new world order—can emerge: a new era—freer from
the threat of terror, stronger in the pursuit of justice, and more
secure in the quest for peace. An era in which the nations of the world,
East and West, North and South, can prosper and live in harmony. A
hundred generations have searched for this elusive path to peace, while a
thousand wars raged across the span of human endeavor. Today that new
world is struggling to be born, a world quite different from the one
we've known. A world where the rule of law supplants the rule of the
jungle. A world in which nations recognize the shared responsibility for
freedom and justice. A world where the strong respect the rights of the
weak. This is the vision that I shared with President Gorbachev in
Helsinki. He and other leaders from Europe, the Gulf, and around the
world understand that how we manage this crisis today could shape the
future for generations to come. (Address Before a Joint Session of Congress, September 11, 1990.)

The speeches cited above could, of course, have been delivered by the then head of the counterfeit church of conciliarism, Karol Wojtyla/John Paul II, who spoke incessantly about a "new civilization of love," something that is near and to the heart of Jorge Mario Bergoglio/Francis The Pagan.

Pardon me.

I digress.

Bush the Elder's "new world order," which had been a goal of President Thomas Woodrow Wilson upon his own upon taking office on March 4, 1913 (Wilson labeled his "new world order" as "the new freedoms"), did not work out too well for him electorally as he won only 37.5% of the popular vote to Clinton's 43.01% in 1992 as Henry Ross Perot attracted 18.91% percent of the popular vote. Since that time, only his son, George Walker Bush, cracked the fifty percent mark, garnering 50.73 of the popular vote in 2004 to John F. Kerry's 48.27% of the vote, hardly a landslide, although three points better than Bush the Younger had earned in 2000 when he actually lost the popular vote to incumbent Vice President Albert Arnold Gore, Jr., by half a percentage point (47.87% for Bush to Gore's 48.38%).

True, Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro is the only Democrat since James Earl Carter, Jr., in 1976 to earn over fifty-one percent of the popular vote, doing so both in 2008 and 2012 as William Jefferson Blythe Clinton only received 43.01% in 1992 and 49.23% against the hapless, mercurial and ever-inarticulate thirty-third degree Freemason named Robert Joseph Dole, Jr. (R-Kansas, then by way of the Watergate Hotel in which he lived). However, the electoral mathematics does not favor the organized crime family of the naturalist "right," and Obama/Soetoro is making sure to change the demography of currently "red" states such as Arizona and Texas by rewarding those who enter this country illegally so as to make them beholden to the Democratic Party for generations to come.

Thus it is that the belief of Republican careerists that that must "play it safe" to win a majority in the United States Senate in 2014 and then the presidency itself in 2016 is illusory as those who stand for nothing are always easy prey for those who believe in their ideas, no matter how false and evil they may be of their very nature, which is why Obama and his minions continue to make fools of Congressional Republicans.

The Republican careerists are statists who have no intention of retarding the growth of the welfare state or of restoring even a modicum of respect for those parts of the Constitution of the United States of America delineating the legitimate powers that can be exercised by the three branches of the Federal government. As has been noted many times on this site, the Constitution is defenseless against men such as Obama/Soetoro because it admits of nothing higher than the text of its own words and does not recognize the Sovereignty of Christ the King over men and their nations, something that is nothing other than an absolute guarantor of the triumph of statism in the end (see Still Utterly Defenseless Against Itself).

For the Democrats and Republicans alike, of course, it's always about the money, the money, the money and the money. The only difference is that the Democrats are brutally honest about their Marxist aspirations of income redistribution wrought by the confiscatory taxing power of the Federal government in the name of "economic justice" and "fairness" while the Republicans want to paint themselves a more "business-friendly" version of the Democrats without doing anything to jeopardize the inroads of the expansion of the size and scope of Federal power, including the power of the presidents to spy on ordinary American citizens and to use government agencies to intimidate, harass and even threaten political opponents with prosecution for even daring to criticize them and their policies, as to do so would to alienate "swing" or "moderate voters.

Speaking before a largely hostile group of twenty-something know-it-alls at Harvard University's commencement proceedings on June 8, 1978, Soviet dissident Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, whose Gulag Archipielago documented the totalitarian crimes of the Soviet "criminal justice" and "penal" institutions against political opponents, something that is coming to a neighborhood near you soon enough, condemned Western materialism just four years after Soviet dictator Leonid Brezhnev had exiled him out of his beloved Russia and two years after his arrival in the United States, where he stayed until he returned to Russia in 1996. Although Solzhenitsyn as a Russian nationalist adherent of Russian Orthodoxy and thus hated the Catholic Church, his insights about Western materialism are as relevant today as they were thirty-five year ago now:

When the modern Western States were created, the following principle
was proclaimed: governments are meant to serve man, and man lives to
be free to pursue happiness. (See, for example, the American
Declaration). Now at last during past decades technical and social
progress has permitted the realization of such aspirations: the
welfare state. Every citizen has been granted the desired freedom and
material goods in such quantity and of such quality as to guarantee in
theory the achievement of happiness, in the morally inferior sense
which has come into being during those same decades. In the process,
however, one psychological detail has been overlooked: the constant
desire to have still more things and a still better life and the
struggle to obtain them imprints many Western faces with worry and
even depression, though it is customary to conceal such
feelings. Active and tense competition permeates all human thoughts
without opening a way to free spiritual development. The individual's
independence from many types of state pressure has been guaranteed;
the majority of people have been granted well-being to an extent their
fathers and grandfathers could not even dream about; it has become
possible to raise young people according to these ideals, leading them
to physical splendor, happiness, possession of material goods, money
and leisure, to an almost unlimited freedom of enjoyment. So who
should now renounce all this, why and for what should one risk one's
precious life in defense of common values, and particularly in such
nebulous cases when the security of one's nation must be defended in a
distant country?

Even biology knows that habitual extreme safety and well-being are not
advantageous for a living organism. Today, well-being in the life of
Western society has begun to reveal its pernicious mask.

Western society has given itself the organization best suited to its
purposes, based, I would say, on the letter of the law. The limits of
human rights and righteousness are determined by a system of laws;
such limits are very broad. People in the West have acquired
considerable skill in using, interpreting and manipulating law, even
though laws tend to be too complicated for an average person to
understand without the help of an expert. Any conflict is solved
according to the letter of the law and this is considered to be the
supreme solution. If one is right from a legal point of view, nothing
more is required, nobody may mention that one could still not be
entirely right, and urge self-restraint, a willingness to renounce
such legal rights, sacrifice and selfless risk: it would sound simply
absurd. One almost never sees voluntary self-restraint. Everybody
operates at the extreme limit of those legal frames. An oil company is
legally blameless when it purchases an invention of a new type of
energy in order to prevent its use. A food product manufacturer is
legally blameless when he poisons his produce to make it last longer:
after all, people are free not to buy it.

I have spent all my life under a communist regime and I will tell you
that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one
indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not
quite worthy of man either. A society which is based on the letter of
the law and never reaches any higher is taking very scarce advantage
of the high level of human possibilities. The letter of the law is too
cold and formal to have a beneficial influence on society. Whenever
the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relations, there is an
atmosphere of moral mediocrity, paralyzing man's noblest impulses.

And it will be simply impossible to stand through the trials of this
threatening century with only the support of a legalistic structure. (Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, A World Split Apart, June 8, 1978.)

What Solzhenitsyn did not realize or accept was the plight of both East and West during the height of the Cold War was the logical result of the overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King wrought by the Protestant Revolution in the Sixteenth Century and then cemented into place by the various organize forces of naturalism that can be called by the term Judeo-Masonry as the goal of Talmudism and Masonry is the elimination of public reference to Christ the King and to His true Church that He founded upon the Rock of Peter, the Pope.

The overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King made possible the inevitable rise and triumph of statism, which is the Adversary's way of preparing for the coming of Antichrist, who has many figures in the world of Modernity and in the world of Modernism in the counterfeit church of conciliarism.

Consider this analysis offered by Monsignor Leon Cristiani in 1959, foreshadowing some of the same themes that would be explored by Dr. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn at Harvard University nineteen years later:

We should form an entirely false picture of our present world if we were to confuse the present division into East and West with the conflict of Satan against God, or to divide the earth into absolutely separate zones: the Devil's zone, covering China, Russia,and the other communist countries, and God's zone, covering ourselves.

Let us hear what a Russian has to say. Not so long ago our papers published an interview with a Soviet engineer, who had come ot Western Europe on a scientific mission entailing a fairly long stay. He said:

"All you Westeners are at heart materialists. With money you can obtain all the goods you want and satisfy all your desires. As a result, your activities, your science, your technology, all your occupations and preoccupations, are devoted to the physical end of improving your living conditions and increasing your comfort. Cars, refrigerators, television--for the immense majority this is your sole purpose in life.'

Who would dare to deny that this accusation is, in the main, justified? Materialism is not the basic flaw in Communism alone, it is the basic flaw in capitalism also. According to this engineer, the degradation inflicted on man by capitalism is even greater than that inflicted by communist regimes. Here is his further comment:

'For us, on the other hand, such questions do not exist [that is, the search for comfort]. Your comfort is practically unknown to us. Since we have no such possibilities, we do not even dream of them. The desire for a practical good, which characterizes all your energy, has been destroyed in us. And this destruction has liberated us. All the energy that you squander in quest of futilities, we use for reading, for reflection, reverie, music-making. What else can we do, when in the evening we come home to our restricted living space, rather like a monk to his cell?'

And he concluded with the words, 'Yes, we still have time and inclination to think, but have you'?

How reassuring it would be if amongst the occupations such as reading, music-making, reflection, reverie which the Russian engineer ear-marked for his own, there had been that little word 'prayer'. Nevertheless, it remains true that this engineer's ideals were a great deal superior to those laid down by communist leaders: to reach and surpass the level of the United States in productivity, in material wealth, in millions of ton and steel and coal, in the production of electricity, cars, television transmitters, and so on. The aims which the Soviet engineer despised--and which we also despise--are in so far as they militate against the spiritual development of humanity--are precisely those which the leaders of his people, and of other communist countries, have laid down as their objectives. Communism in China has been defined as: 'To each according to his needs,' and our needs, in this formulations, are to be interpreted exclusively as material needs.

But it is not for us to set capitalism against communism. Both are inspired by Satan, to the extent that they are a negation of God and the soul. Communism, in fact, has done no more than develop the so-called 'bourgeois' philosophy, of which it is the end-product. If it is true that there is neither God, nor Devil, nor spirit, then neither capitalism nor communism is any more than than the other, for there is no more truth, in the strict sense of the word, for all the falsehood, all is satanic.

It is therefore without any particular satisfaction, but without diffidence, that one may declare that there are certain undeniable proofs of the presence of the Satan in our contemporary 'civilisation': proofs which few can refuse to admit:

(1) The mediocrity of our great media of communication such as the wireless, cinema and television: not mediocrity in technique in technique in propaganda, but in the beauty of nobility of their influence on people's minds;

(2) The erotic atmosphere exuded by our novels and plays, in popular songs, in all that can be summed up as 'show business';

(3) The degradation of modern art, which seems to have lost all feeling for beauty, and to be concerned only with ugliness and obscurity;

To conclude this chapter, which could easily having been extended, what do we see in the world around us?

Satan everywhere at work. Opposed to him one single authentic force: Jesus Christ. On the one hand atheistic materialism, lies, contempt for human life, the bloody of Abel shed by Cain. On the other hand, faith, charity, the immeasurable power of love, adoration, the rejection of satanic hatred; the longing for the universal acceptance of the Kingdom of God, the power of the constant aspiration of the human heart: 'Thy Kingdom come!'

The vision of world history has not changed: the City of God against the City of Satan--the City of Love against the City of Hatred. There are two banners flying: that of Satan and that of Jesus Christ!

Strangely enough, the Christian who avowedly despises our present life because he knows that there is another which is eternal, nevertheless practices the most absolute respect for human life and human personality. Satan, on the contrary, persuades his followers that our present life is the only one, and that therefore this life is man's supreme good, yet he manifests his contempt for the same life by concentration camps, by the nightmare of the crematoria, by massive executions and degrading tortures. In other words, falsehood and murders are akin.

But the greatest reproach that can be levelled against the Devil's disciples is their mutilation of man's stature, by denying his infinity and refusing him immortality.

The most deplorable thing about the incredulous is their narrowness of mind. They deserve the reproach flung by Tertullian at the heretics of his day: 'Parce orbis unicae spei' (Spare the sole hope of the world). If we were indeed to possess this universe, which is not of the same value our souls, we must first, by faith and love, save our souls

How much is at stake in this struggle between Christ and Satan! (Leon Cristiani, Evidence of Satan in the Modern World, translated by Cynthia Rowland, published originally in 1961, by Barrie Books, Ltd., and republished by TAN Books and Publishers in 1974, pp.167-172. My thanks to a reader who sent me about a copy of seventeen pages from the text of this book.)

As good as this analysis remains over the course of time, Monsignor Cristiani did not understand that Satan was at work what he praised as the liturgical, Biblical and mystical revolutions in the Catholic Church that was only "just beginning" and would "respond to the justified longings of a French writer, Maria Winowska, and a young Hindu convert of hers:

Maria Winowska protested that we could not judge the clergy from a superficial contact. One cannot accuse them of activism without knowing the whole of their inner life. We have already had two 'revolutions' in religious matters in the last fifty years; a liturgical revolution which is still from having borne full fruit, and a biblical revolution which is only just beginning. We have to achieve a mystical revolution which will respond to the justified longings of Maria Winowska and our young Hindu. (Leon Cristiani, Evidence of Satan in the Modern World, translated by Cynthia Rowland, published originally in 1961, by Barrie Books, Ltd., and republished by TAN Books and Publishers in 1974, p. 168.)

Unfortunately for the late Monsignor Cristiani, however, the "revolutions" he extolled did come to fruition, but only to advance the agenda of Satan who had engineered them in the first place. This has done thing but make more possible the triumph of statism and the spread of grave moral evils under the cover of the civil law.

This era will pass. We cannot live in constant states of agitation as this itself is an effort on the part of the devil to discourage and demoralize.

Nothing we suffer in this life, no, not even the terrible state of the world or the abominable state of the Church Militant in this time of apostasy and betrayal, is beyond our capacity to endure as we cooperate with the graces won for us by Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ on the wood of the Holy Cross and that flow into our hearts and souls through the loving hands of Our Lady, she who is the Mediatrix of All Graces.

Yes, we We are called to be detached the world and not to immerse ourselves in
its activities uncritically. Thomas a Kempis tells us the following in
his The Imitation of Christ:

But the wise of the world and the wise
according to the flesh are destitute of Thy wisdom; for in the former is
found much vanity and in the later death.

But they that follow Thee, by the contempt
of worldly things and the mortification of the flesh, are found to be
wise indeed; for they are translated from vanity to truth, from the
flesh to the spirit.

Now the whole essence of a Christian life is to reject the corruption of
the world and to oppose constantly any indulgence in it; this is taught
in the words and deeds, the laws and institutions, the life and death
of Jesus Christ, "the author and finisher of faith." Hence, however
strongly We are deterred by the evil disposition of nature and
character, it is our duty to run to the "fight proposed to Us,"
fortified and armed with the same desire and the same arms as He who,
"having joy set before him, endured the cross." Wherefore let men
understand this specially, that it is most contrary to Christian duty to
follow, in worldly fashion, pleasures of every kind, to be afraid of
the hardships attending a virtuous life, and to deny nothing to self
that soothes and delights the senses. "They that are Christ's, have
crucified their flesh, with the vices and concupiscences"] -- so that it
follows that they who are not accustomed to suffering, and who hold not
ease and pleasure in contempt belong not to Christ. By the infinite
goodness of God man lived again to the hope of an immortal life, from
which he had been cut off, but he cannot attain to it if he strives not
to walk in the very footsteps of Christ and conform his mind to Christ's
by the meditation of Christ's example. Therefore this is not a counsel
but a duty, and it is the duty, not of those only who desire a more
perfect life, but clearly of every man "always bearing about in our body
the mortification of Jesus." How otherwise could the natural law,
commanding man to live virtuously, be kept? For by holy baptism the sin
which we contracted at birth is destroyed, but the evil and tortuous
roots of sin, which sin has engrafted, and by no means removed. This
part of man which is without reason -- although it cannot beat those who
fight manfully by Christ's grace -- nevertheless struggles with reason
for supremacy, clouds the whole soul and tyrannically bends the will
from virtue with such power that we cannot escape vice or do our duty
except by a daily struggle. "This holy synod teaches that in the
baptized there remains concupiscence or an inclination to evil, which,
being left to be fought against, cannot hurt those who do not consent to
it, and manfully fight against it by the grace of Jesus Christ; for he
is not crowned who does not strive lawfully." There is in this struggle a
degree of strength to which only a very perfect virtue, belonging to
those who, by putting to flight evil passions, has gained so high a
place as to seem almost to live a heavenly life on earth. Granted; grant
that few attain such excellence; even the philosophy of the ancients
taught that every man should restrain his evil desires, and still more
and with greater care those who from daily contact with the world have
the greater temptations -- unless it be foolishly thought that where the
danger is greater watchfulness is less needed, or that they who are
more grievously ill need fewer medicines. (Pope Leo XIII, Exeunte Iam Anno, December 25, 1888.)

What can we do with our time rather than be agitated by the constant flow of naturalism from the "talking heads"?

If this is possible in one's own area, how about spending some more time before Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ in the Most Blessed Sacrament.

How about praying more Rosaries?

Why not read more books about the lives of the saints?

Why
not take our families to shrines of Our Lady to pray her Most Holy
Rosary.

Why not put First Things first in light
of Last Things each and every moment of our lives?

Saint Paul explained the joys that await us are indescribable:

Howbeit we speak wisdom among the perfect: yet not
the wisdom of this world, neither of the princes of this world that come
to nought; But we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, a wisdom which
is hidden, which God ordained before the world, unto our glory: Which
none of the princes of this world knew; for if they had known it, they
would never have crucified the Lord of glory. But, as it is written:
That eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither hath it entered into the
heart of man, what things God hath prepared for them that love him. But
to us God hath revealed them, by this Spirit. For the Spirit searcheth
all things, yea, the deep things of God.

For what man knoweth the things of a
man, but the spirit of a man that is in him? So the things also that are
of God no man knoweth, but the Spirit of God. Now we have received not
the spirit of this world, but the Spirit that is of God; that we may
know the things that are given us from God. Which things also we speak,
not in the learned words of human wisdom; but in the doctrine of the
Spirit, comparing spiritual things with spiritual. But the sensual man
perceiveth not these things that are of the Spirit of God; for it is
foolishness to him, and he cannot understand, because it is spiritually
examined. But the spiritual man judgeth all things; and he himself is
judged of no man. (1 Cor. 2: 6-15.)

May Saint Joachim, the father of the Most Blessed Virgin Mary, help us to love his ever immaculate, ever virgin daughter so that we will trust more in her maternal intercession as we offer up all of the trials and difficulties of the present moment, no matter how difficult they may appear to us, to the throne of the Most Blessed Trinity through her own Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart.

There will be the triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary soon enough, and it will be at that point that the statism of the naturalism left and that of the naturalist right will be swept away as their leaders become nothing other than forgettable footnotes of human history.